Math Skills

Take the opportunity to look at math in everyday life and explore numbers with your children. For example:

* Counting – use toys, crayons, or coins to practice counting and to express quantities.

* Money – begin introducing your child to the monetary values of coins at an early age.

* Addition – add small piles of objects to illustrate addition.

* Subtraction

– remove items from a pile of objects to demonstrate “take away.”

* Fractions – pieces of pizza or pie are great visuals for equally dividing a whole into parts.

* Greater Than/Less Than – children can learn “more than” or “fewer than” with visual representation, such as number of buttons, toy dinosaurs, beans, etc.

* Telling Time – talk about hour and minute hands on the clock and begin to give children a sense of the times of day

* Patterns – identify patterns around you, or use blocks to create patterns; this is an excellent tool for predicting outcome.

* Measurement – use hands or steps to determine lengths of measure.

* Geometry – familiarize your child with various shapes and the number of sides for each.